The Wrath of Putin

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia when he dared confront then president Vladimir Putin, criticizing state corruption at a meeting with Putin in February 2003. Arrested that fall, then convicted in two Kafka-esque trials, Khodorkovsky has been imprisoned ever since, the once powerful oligarch now an invisible hero for the growing opposition to Putin’s tyranny. From Moscow, as elections approach and demonstrators spill into the streets, Masha Gessen chronicles the clash of two titans, each of whom has badly underestimated the other.

UNDERSTOOD? Vladimir Putin, now seeking to return to the presidency for a third term, at his dacha in 2007. Putin gave the Russian business community two options: bend to his will or suffer the fate of Khodorkovsky., PHOTOGRAPH BY PLATON/TRUNK ARCHIVE.

This is the story of two men who are central to each other’s lives, though they have neither met nor spoken in more than eight years. One of the men has spent this time amassing impressive power and untold wealth. The palace he built for himself sprawls over eight million square feet. He travels from world capital to world capital. Everywhere he goes, he is asked about the other man. The other man has spent the past eight years behind bars, going for months without seeing the sky. He has lost his business and most of his money. His family, his friends, and most of his colleagues have stood by him, but the decisive relationship of his life remains the one with the first man.

It is a story of malice, cruelty, and vengeance—but more than anything it is a story of a failure of imagination. Almost a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the owner of the Yukos Oil Company and Russia’s richest man, completely miscalculated the consequences of standing up to Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president. Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested, completely miscalculating the consequences of putting him in prison. During his eight years in confinement, Khodorkovsky has become Russia’s most trusted public figure and Putin’s biggest political liability. As long as Putin rules Russia and Khodorkovsky continues to act like Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky will remain in prison—and Putin will remain terrified of him.

Of his eight years without freedom, Khodorkovsky has spent more than half in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina Detention Facility, a 246-year-old jail, where living conditions are far more punishing than those in a distant prison colony. He has declined to describe the conditions in which he has been kept in any but the most general terms, arguing that he is no different from other inmates, but those who have been held in the same place describe cramped cells with a hole in the floor that serves as the toilet. Inmates take cold meals sitting on their cots, a few feet from the hole. Access to the outdoors is virtually nonexistent. Khodorkovsky has spent a total of nearly three full years attending his two trials, transported to court and back in an armored car with a small holding compartment in which he must ride standing up and bent over. During the first trial, he and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, were made to sit in a cage, behind heavy steel bars. During the second trial, after a complaint was lodged with the European Court for Human Rights, they were displayed inside a Plexiglas cube.

At the root of the conflict between Putin and Khodorkovsky lies a basic difference in character. Putin rarely says what he means and even less frequently trusts that others are saying what they mean. Khodorkovsky, in contrast, seems to have always taken himself and others at face value—he has constructed his identity in accordance with his convictions and his life in accordance with his identity. That is what landed him in prison and what has kept him there.

“His Majesty, Money”

My first encounter with Mikhail Khodorkovsky came in 2002, when he met with a group of young authors to try out what would become his stump speech as he traveled the country, urging the creation of a new kind of economy in Russia, one based on intellectual rather than mineral resources. Over the years, I have attended his court appearances, interviewed and occasionally socialized with people close to him, and, in my job at a Moscow magazine, served as Khodorkovsky’s editor, publishing letters that he wrote from prison. I have come to know his family and his circle.

If I had met Khodorkovsky 30 years earlier, when we were both schoolchildren in Moscow, the last thing I could have imagined was that he was destined to become a political prisoner. The next-to-last was that he would become a wealthy man someday. Mikhail’s parents, engineers in Moscow who spent their entire careers at a measuring-instruments factory, had chosen to keep their own political skepticism from their only son. Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky were old enough to have experienced the rise of state anti-Semitism (Boris is Jewish) and the death of Stalin; they belonged to the generation of well-educated Soviet citizens who tended to be broadly dismissive of Soviet ideology and silently supportive of the dissidents. Mikhail was born in 1963, as the Soviet Union was entering what has become known as the Era of Stagnation. The family had their own apartment, two rooms and a small kitchen in a concrete block far from the city center. In other words, they were moderately well off. The parents’ dilemma was a common one: Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or try to raise a contented conformist. They chose the second path, with results that far exceeded their expectations. Mikhail became a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct.

At the Mendeleev Chemistry and Technology Institute, one of the colleges of choice for ambitious young people whose Jewish surnames made them ineligible for Moscow University, Khodorkovsky became active in the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol. Upon getting his degree, in 1986, he was hired by the Komsomol. He would seem to have been embarking on a career in politics, Soviet-style. After several years of working mostly to collect Komsomol dues from fellow students, he could expect to be appointed to a junior position in city management someplace far from the capital.

History intervened, and the Komsomol job positioned him to become an entrepreneur instead. Because he was a part of the system, and well liked by highly placed apparatchiks, Khodorkovsky could take advantage of quasi-official and often extra-legal business opportunities. It had started even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. In his mid-20s, Khodorkovsky had tried his hand at importing personal computers and, according to some sources, counterfeit alcohol. He had also ventured into finance, devising ways to squeeze cash out of the Soviet planned-economy behemoth. In 1988 he founded his own bank, called Menatep. He served as an economic adviser to Boris Yeltsin’s first government. During the failed 1991 coup by Communist hard-liners, he was on the barricades in front of Moscow’s White House, helping to defend the government. It had, after all, been very good to Khodorkovsky.

By the early 1990s the former Komsomol functionary had undergone his first conversion. He no longer believed in Communism; he now believed in wealth. He and his friend and business partner, a former software engineer named Leonid Nevzlin, produced a capitalist manifesto called The Man with the Ruble. “It is time to stop living according to Lenin!,” they wrote. “Our guiding light is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life.”

Khodorkovsky would soon become a household name in Russia—less as a capitalist ideologue than simply as a very rich man. He built a new life in accordance with his new philosophy. Laws dragged behind reality as Russia struggled to emerge from the ruins of the U.S.S.R.; entrepreneurs were deemed outlaws, and behaved accordingly. Several of the earliest Russian millionaires had to flee the country to save their lives; many saw children or business partners kidnapped for ransom; dozens were gunned down in broad daylight or poisoned to death in the privacy of their offices.

Khodorkovsky seemed unfazed by the risks. Nevzlin told me of an incident early in their association. Khodorkovsky was on a business trip in Poland when the Soviet economic-crimes unit started harassing Nevzlin; since most Soviet laws were still on the books, their importing and banking business was in violation of dozens of them simultaneously. Nevzlin could barely wait to pick up his partner at the train station in Moscow and alert him to what was happening. “It was terrifying,” he recalled. “They were breathing down our necks. Arrest was a real possibility. And he listened to me and then said, ‘You know, I just got off the train. Let me go home, take a shower, get some sleep, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow morning.’ I was shocked. He was an alien! There was just no way to shake him, ever.”

I spoke with Nevzlin in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he owns a mansion in the backcountry. He has spent most of the last eight years living in Israel, investing in media there and in real estate all over the world. Nevzlin is 52 but looked at least 10 years younger, perhaps because he was wearing madras shorts and leather sandals, Israeli-style. He remembers the late 1980s, when he and Khodorkovsky became rich, as a time of personal liberation. “I had always lived from paycheck to paycheck, I had always felt poor, and I always found it humiliating,” he said. “When I went to work for Khodorkovsky, I finally experienced freedom.” Khodorkovsky found the same period exhilarating mainly for the intellectual challenge. Nevzlin described his friend and partner as both a data addict and someone dependent on human stimulus for information and ideas. He also seemed to possess an iron will. “He has strong emotions,” Nevzlin told me. “But when it comes to making decisions, he can just turn them off. His thinking runs perpendicular to his feelings.”

The only exception may have been love. It came to Khodorkovsky in 1986, when he was 23. Like most of his peers, he was already married by the time he graduated from college—he had wed a fellow student named Yelena. He left his wife and toddler son, Pavel, and camped out in front of the future Inna Khodorkovskaya’s apartment, in a faceless complex on the outskirts of Moscow. She was a first-year night student at the Mendeleev Institute and had gotten a job in the dues department of the Komsomol organization where Khodorkovsky worked. He slept in his car until the 18-year-old Inna succumbed. They have been married for 25 years and have three children—a daughter who was 12 when Khodorkovsky was arrested and twin boys who were 4. Khodorkovsky continued to see his son from his first marriage and has stayed on good terms with his first wife, who has become an activist working for his release.

In the inflation-ridden 1990s, Khodorkovsky made millions in currency trading. He also bought up privatization vouchers—documents distributed to every Russian citizen and entitling them to a share of the national wealth—which many Russians were happy to unload at a discount for ready cash. Khodorkovsky eventually acquired controlling stakes in some 30 companies. When Russia staged its greatest property giveaway ever, in 1995, Khodorkovsky was poised to take advantage of that too.

Not Just a Game

At the time, the government still nominally controlled Russia’s largest companies, though they had been variously re-structured, abandoned, or looted by their own executives. The new oligarchs—a dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money brought—concocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval. Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov took control of Norilsk Nickel, the mining giant. Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky took control of the oil giant Sibneft. Khodorkovsky came into possession of Yukos, another big oil company.

Yukos was in fact not just a single entity. It was a conglomerate of more than 20 companies, accounting for about a fifth of all the oil produced in Russia. Most of the companies were in terrible condition. The next couple of years were among the happiest in Khodorkovsky’s life. He later said he had always dreamed of being in charge of an industrial operation. Both of his parents had worked at one. He now had more than enough challenges to occupy his overcapable mind: hundreds of thousands of employees, an antiquated system of drilling, and an assortment of “red directors” who were fighting his management style.

These days the story of Khodorkovsky as a paragon of corporate and even political virtue all but writes itself. In the 1990s, however, there was little that distinguished him from other Russian robber barons. Like the rest of them, he happily appropriated state property, paying little or nothing at all for it; like the rest of them, he allowed company managers to siphon off profits and even property.

In terms of personal behavior, however, Khodorkovsky proved to be the most reticent among the oligarchs. He didn’t buy yachts or villas on the Côte d’Azur, and he left the Moscow playboy scene to his extrovert partners, Nevzlin and finance man Platon Lebedev. Not that he was reluctant to spend money. In the late 1990s, Khodorkovsky paid for a gated compound of seven houses on 50 forested acres about half an hour outside Moscow. The compound was given the aspirational name Apple Orchard. Though fancy by the standards of 1990s Moscow, the houses were perhaps a quarter of the size of Nevzlin’s Greenwich mansion. The oil company’s top brass would live in Apple Orchard as one large happy family. Khodorkovsky installed gas heaters outdoors, allowing him to extend Moscow’s brief barbecue season. Barbecuing for fellow Yukos managers represented the bulk of his socializing. “He would come home at 10,” says Nevzlin, who lived in the house across the street from Khodorkovsky’s in Apple Orchard. “After a little while the light would go on in his study, where he would read until two.”

Regular exercise was one of Khodorkovsky’s few major lifestyle adjustments. In the late 1990s he shaped up, shedding the 30 unnecessary pounds he had carried around since college, shaving off his small black gangster mustache, and exchanging oversize aviator glasses for delicate rimless spectacles. He never really learned to wear suits and ties, so he compromised by wearing turtlenecks under sport coats. Although his dress was casual, his manner was unusually reserved. He addressed all but his closest friends by the formal pronoun, vy. He was exceedingly punctual and incapable, in conversation, of venturing into personal territory.

“I saw business as a game,” Khodorkovsky later wrote about this period in his life. “It was a game in which you wanted to win but losing was also an option. It was a game in which hundreds of thousands of people came to work in the morning to play with me. And in the evening they would go back to their own lives, which had nothing to do with me.”

Khodorkovsky underwent his second conversion when the game stopped being fun. In August 1998 the Russian government defaulted on its debt obligations, sending the country into financial free fall. Khodorkovsky’s bank died in the crash. Yukos was also in trouble: the price of oil on the world markets was $8 a barrel, but Yukos, with its outmoded equipment, was spending $12 to produce a barrel. The company had no cash to pay its workers. Khodorkovsky later remembered:

I would go to our oil rigs, and people would not even yell at me. They were not going on strike: they were understanding. It’s just that they were fainting from hunger. Especially the young people who had small children and did not have their own vegetable gardens. And the hospitals—before then, we used to buy medication, we would send people to be treated elsewhere if they needed it, but now we did not have the money. But the worst thing were these understanding faces. People were just saying, “We never expected anything good. We are just grateful you came here to talk to us. We’ll be patient.”

At the age of 34, one of Russia’s richest men realized that business could no longer be just a game. He now understood that capitalism could make people not only rich and happy but also poor and powerless. Khodorkovsky swore off his absolute faith in wealth just as he had sworn off his absolute faith in Communism.

When the price of oil began to recover, he formed a foundation and called it Open Russia. He funded Internet cafés in the provinces, to get people to talk to one another. He funded training sessions for journalists all over the country. He established a boarding school for disadvantaged children and pulled his own parents out of retirement to run it. By some estimates, he was supporting half of all non-governmental organizations in Russia; by others, he was funding 80 percent of them. In 2003, Yukos pledged $100 million over 10 years to the Russian State Humanities University, the best liberal-arts school in the country—the first time a private company had contributed a significant amount of money to a Russian educational institution.

Khodorkovsky also became preoccupied with the idea of transforming Yukos into a properly managed, transparently governed enterprise. He hired McKinsey & Company to reform the management structure, and Pricewaterhouse to create an accounting system. “Before Pricewaterhouse came along, all the Yukos accountants knew how to do was stomp their feet and steal a bit at a time,” Khodorkovsky’s former tax lawyer, Pavel Ivlev, told me.

The capitalization of Yukos grew rapidly, owing in part to rising oil prices, in part to modernized drilling and refining operations, in part to the new transparency. By 2003, Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia, and potentially on his way to becoming the richest man in the world. In 2004, Forbes placed him 16th on its list of the world’s wealthiest people, with a fortune estimated at $16 billion. He claimed to have no personal political ambitions. Whenever someone suggested he might run for president, Khodorkovsky pointed out that, having a Jewish father, he was unelectable in Russia. But one way or another, he fully intended to transform the country.

Vladimir vs. Mikhail

On December 31, 1999, former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s president. Putin moved quickly to consolidate authority in the Kremlin, taking power away from the elected parliament and local governors as well as from big business. He cracked down on the opposition and on the media. People who stood up to him often found themselves on the run—or dead. Putin made it abundantly clear what he wanted from the oligarchs: he wanted them to share their wealth with him and his allies, and he wanted them to stay out of politics. Those who refused would not be around to complain. Vladimir Gusinsky had owned a media company, including two television networks and several magazines; his journalists had been highly critical of Putin. Gusinsky was arrested and forced to sign over his company to the state. He was then allowed to leave the country. Once in the West, he claimed that his signature had been coerced. Russia responded by issuing an international warrant for his arrest. Gusinsky has spent the last 11 years living in Israel.

The stage was set for a confrontation. In February 2003, Putin summoned Russia’s wealthiest businessmen for a discussion. It was open to the media—a rare event: by this time, important political meetings occurred mainly behind closed doors. Against his partners’ counsel, Khodorkovsky went to the meeting intent on standing up to Putin. He took a PowerPoint presentation highlighting facts that everyone present was certainly aware of but just as certainly tried to pretend they did not know. Slide Six was titled “Corruption Costs the Russian Economy over $30 Billion a Year” and cited four different studies that had arrived at more or less the same figure. Slide Eight was titled “The Shaping of a New Generation” and contained a chart comparing three different institutions of higher learning: one that produced oil-industry managers, one that trained tax inspectors, and one that prepared civil servants. Competition to get into the last college reached almost 11 applicants per spot, whereas aspiring tax inspectors had to beat out only four competitors, and future oil-industry managers had to fight off fewer than two—even though starting salaries in the oil industry were as much as three times higher than those in the government sector. The explanation, according to Khodorkovsky: high-school students choosing civil service were factoring in what they could expect to make from corruption.

Khodorkovsky also brought up the recent merger of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft with a smaller, privately held oil company. “Everyone thinks the deal had, shall we say, a second layer,” Khodorkovsky said, alluding to the glaringly high price Rosneft had paid. “The president of Rosneft is here—perhaps he’d care to comment.” The president of Rosneft did not care to comment, which looked very much like a public admission of guilt.

The person who did comment was Putin. To those who knew Putin, it was clear from a characteristic smirk on his face that he was livid. “Some companies, including Yukos, have extraordinary reserves,” he said. “The question is: How did the company get them?” He shifted in his chair to raise his right shoulder in a gesture that made him seem larger. His thuggish smile made it plain that he was making a threat, not asking for information. “And your company had its own issues with taxes. To give the Yukos leadership its due, it found a way to settle everything and take care of all its problems with the state. But maybe this is the reason there is such competition to get into the tax academy?” Putin was accusing Khodorkovsky of having bribed tax inspectors. Between the lines, he was also threatening a takeover of Yukos.

On July 2, 2003, Khodorkovsky’s longtime business partner, Platon Lebedev, was arrested. Several weeks later, the head of security for Yukos, a former K.G.B. officer, was also taken into custody. One associate wrote up a prescription for Khodorkovsky: things to do to avoid arrest. The document was never seen by Khodorkovsky, because another associate ripped it up in outrage. In any case, it was obvious what Khodorkovsky should do: supplicate (as the document suggested) or leave the country (as his friends counseled).

“I was telling him they are thugs,” says Nevzlin. “That we should leave our hostages behind and leave the country and try to bargain from a position of freedom. And that we should take our money out and start a new business and a new life.” Nevzlin himself did just that. But Khodorkovsky couldn’t. In his value system, fleeing the country once Lebedev was in jail would have been immoral, regardless of whether he could do anything to help his friend.

Instead of leaving, Khodorkovsky went on a speaking tour, clearly courting danger. The theme of his barnstorming was that Russia must join the modern world: stop running its companies like fiefdoms at best and prisons at worst; transform its economy into one based on the export of knowledge and expertise rather than just oil and gas; value its educated workers and pay them well. Khodorkovsky was not a great public speaker. He tended to be stiff, and his voice was soft and incongruously high. But he could leverage the force of conviction and the weight of his reputation. He traveled by chartered jet with a team of a dozen, including eight bodyguards and a young woman named Marina Litvinovich, who had once been Putin’s image-maker and had undergone an ideological conversion of her own. She told Khodorkovsky that he had a way of belaboring an idea even after the audience had come over to his side, and that this caused him to lose his tempo. During his talks, she sat in the front row with the word TEMPO written on a piece of paper. She would hold it up when he started talking past the sale.

On a cold weekend in October 2003, the Khodorkovsky team was in Saratov, a city on the Volga River. A storm had blown through, and, for some reason no one quite understood, everyone went outside and wandered in the snow. Afterward, Khodorkovsky bid his colleagues good night. The rest of the group stayed up drinking. The next morning, Khodorkovsky told Litvinovich to return to Moscow: she had not seen her three-year-old son in weeks, and he could manage the next leg without her. Around the same time, he called Nevzlin in Israel to talk about nothing in particular, which was something he never did. Nevzlin realized later that Khodorkovsky was saying good-bye.

The Trial

The phone calls came in the dark, pre-dawn hours of October 25: Khodorkovsky had been arrested at the Novosibirsk airport at eight in the morning, five Moscow time. So that’s why he sent me home, thought Litvinovich. Anton Drel, Khodorkovsky’s personal lawyer, got a cryptic message conveyed by a third party: “Mr. Khodorkovsky requested that you be informed that he has been arrested. He said you would know what to do.” Typical Khodorkovsky, thought Drel, who had no idea what to do. In the late morning, he received another phone call: “This is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Would it be convenient for you to come to the prosecutor general’s office now?” He had already been taken to Moscow. Several hours later, Khodorkovsky was charged with fraud, tax evasion, and other economic crimes.

From the moment Putin had Khodorkovsky jailed—the Russian leader has never really denied that this was his personal decision—it was clear that Khodorkovsky would not be released unless he agreed to sign over his assets and leave the country, as Gusinsky had done. It was also clear that Khodorkovsky would not do this. Was Putin prepared to keep him in jail indefinitely?

Some in Russia’s business community and some foreign investors in Russia had cheered when Khodorkovsky was arrested. If the richest of the oligarchs was prosecuted and held to account for the anything-goes behavior of the 1990s, then all of Russia’s wealthy would be on notice. But instead of making a show of Khodorkovsky’s trial, the prosecutors made a travesty of it. They spent months on an incoherent account of alleged violations that were criminalized after they were committed, or that were in fact legal activities.

Pavel Ivlev, a tax lawyer employed by a law firm independent of Yukos, described how the case was put together. “They would call Yukos employees in for questioning, and I went as their attorney,” he told me. “On November 16, the lead detective in the case said to me, ‘Now I am going to interrogate you.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that, it’s against the law.’ ‘I guess we are going to have to break the law then. Tell me all.’ ‘What do you want me to say?’ ‘You are a lawyer—you know the penal code. Whatever you say, we’ll use.’ ‘You want me to describe how we took sacks of cash out of Yukos and delivered them to Khodorkovsky personally?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But nothing like that ever happened.’ That was when he threatened to arrest me.”

Ivlev left the prosecutor’s office and got a plane out of Russia. He did not call his wife until after he had landed in Kiev. Six months later Ivlev and his family settled in New Jersey, where they have lived ever since. Russia has issued an international arrest warrant for him too. He cannot leave the United States.

Khodorkovsky’s first trial lasted 10 months. The defense called few witnesses—not only because the court turned down most of its motions but also because the prosecution’s case seemed so flimsy. Testifying for the defense also posed considerable risk. Ten people affiliated with Yukos, including two lawyers, had already been arrested. Nine more had evaded arrest only by fleeing the country. These numbers would soon seem quite small.

Finding himself in the middle of a Kafka-esque procedure, Genrikh Padva, the lead lawyer for the defense, adopted a pointedly understated style. In his closing arguments, he sounded more like a schoolteacher than the passionate participant in a judicial contest. Over the course of three days, Padva read his arguments, methodically listing all of the prosecution’s errors. “And I won’t even mention the fact that the charges are filed in accordance with laws that went into effect years after these supposed deeds took place,” Padva said. He entertained no illusions about his ability to convince the judges of anything. But in the interest of history and future appeals to international judicial bodies, he needed to get his arguments on record. The judges, three women of around 40, each with a shiny helmet of combed-back hair, sat motionless, their lips pursed in identical demonstrations of displeasure.

“Four-Letter Prisoners”

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were each sentenced to nine years in prison colonies. (Three months later, an appeals court reduced the sentences by a year.) The men were shipped off to different colonies, each far away from Moscow and difficult to reach. Khodorkovsky’s colony, YaG-14/10, established in 1967 to mine uranium, was in Krasnokamensk, which can be reached from Moscow only after a 9-hour trip by airplane and then a 15-hour trip by train. Khodorkovsky spent his days working at the colony’s mitten factory. At night he slept in a wooden barracks, whose identical cots were placed about a yard apart. On several occasions, Khodorkovsky was placed in an unheated solitary cell for days on end for violating colony rules. One of the violations was the possession of two Justice Ministry decrees regulating the rights of inmates. In April 2006 a prisoner named Alexander Kuchma cut Khodorkovsky’s face with a knife and told authorities he had done so because Khodorkovsky had made sexual advances toward him. (Five years later, Kuchma would admit that he had been forced to attack Khodorkovsky by unknown persons who had come to the prison colony and beaten and threatened him.) Every three months, Khodorkovsky was allowed conjugal visits with his wife in an apartment on colony grounds.

Within a year of Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Russia’s largest and most successful oil company, which had once paid 5 percent of all the taxes collected by the central government, was embroiled in bankruptcy proceedings. Its most attractive asset, a company called Yuganskneftegaz, owner of some of Europe’s largest oil reserves, was up for auction. The Russian state gas monopoly, Gazprom, run by a longtime Putin ally, looked poised to win the bid, but lost its financing. Out of nowhere, a newly registered company called Baikalfinansgrup submitted a bid for the company. Journalists immediately descended on its registration address in Tver, a godforsaken city about three hours outside of Moscow; it turned out to be a small building that was used as a legal address by 150 companies, none of which appeared to have any physical assets.

Nor did Baikalfinansgrup. According to its registration documents, filed two weeks before the auction, its capitalization was 10,000 rubles, or roughly $300. But the state-owned oil company Rosneft soon lent the unheard-of company more than $9 billion to buy Yuganskneftegaz. The auction, held on December 19, 2004, lasted two minutes.

Speaking in Germany a few days later, Putin bristled at the suggestion that Yukos assets had been bought by an unknown entity. “I know the stockholders of the company,” he said. “They are individuals who have been working in the energy sector for a long time.” Two days after that, Rosneft, the state oil company, bought Baikalfinansgrup, taking control of the Yukos assets. In time, Rosneft would come to own virtually everything that had once been Yukos, quadrupling in size in the process.

Even before the first trial was over, the prosecution had begun cobbling together a second. If the first set of charges was thin, the second was absurd. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were now accused of having stolen all the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003. The second trial began in March of 2009 and ended in December 2010. The judge sentenced Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to 14 years’ imprisonment.

A score of Russia’s best lawyers, based in Moscow, London, Strasbourg, and New York, have spent eight years beating their heads against various walls on behalf of Khodorkovsky. Laws, they say, are passed specifically to enable his persecution, or adjusted retroactively to sustain it. In May 2011, the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, ruled on the first among dozens of Khodorkovsky’s complaints; the ruling was mostly favorable to Khodorkovsky and might even be read as mandating his release. But the lawyers are convinced that Russia will simply tweak its laws as necessary to make sure it does not have to comply with the spirit of the ruling.

As of this writing, dozens of people have been arrested and jailed on Yukos-related charges, and hundreds of people with a Yukos connection have fled abroad. Putin has been merciless in his prosecution. A top Yukos lawyer suffering from AIDS and leukemia, and who had gone blind and contracted tuberculosis while in jail, was released only once it became clear that the European Court of Human Rights was about to rule in his favor—and even then the Russian government demanded $1.75 million in bond. (The lawyer, Vasily Aleksanyan, died in October.) Many former Yukos employees have already served their time and emerged to find out they are now unemployable in Russia. In the community of the wives and friends of Russian business prisoners (so named by analogy with political prisoners), those who have served Yukos-affiliated time are known as “four-letter prisoners” (Yukos has four letters in Russian).

Khodorkovsky has tried to provide financial support to those who have not found a way to make a living. He is no longer the richest man in Russia, or even one of the dozens of Russia’s super-rich, but he has been able to retain some of his personal fortune, presumably sheltered abroad. Just his share of the 2003 Yukos dividend, issued before the company was hacked apart, would have given him about $1 billion.

Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel, now 26, runs one of several organizations devoted to drawing attention to his father’s fate. I first met Pavel in 2007, the year he graduated from college. (At his father’s urging, he attended Babson, a business school outside Boston.) At a conference at Harvard, I watched a very young man in a gray suit approach a Russian man who had been an adviser to Putin, and who had recently resigned to protest his anti-liberal economic policies. Pavel introduced himself. “Do you think my father will ever get out of jail?” he asked. “Not as long as Putin is in power” was the response he got.

No single cause has done more than Khodorkovsky’s to inspire Russian speakers everywhere. Three of Russia’s best-selling writers have published their correspondence with Khodorkovsky; composers have dedicated symphonies to him; a dozen artists attended his trial and put together an exhibition of courtroom drawings. In July, a group of Soviet-born classical musicians traveled to Strasbourg to mount a concert in honor of Khodorkovsky. The night before the concert, while the musicians were rehearsing, some 50 of Khodorkovsky’s closest supporters met for dinner. They included his mother; his wife and that of Lebedev; their grown children and their children’s partners; Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers; former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and other former Cabinet members who are now in opposition to Putin; and some of the most recognizable faces of the Russian intelligentsia.

Kasyanov and others briefly exchanged the requisite hopeful rumors that Moscow was preparing to release Khodorkovsky. There was meager cause for celebration, but there was at least a little: Khodorkovsky had just been transferred to a prison colony again, to serve his second sentence. This prison colony is not as far from Moscow as the last one, and anyway, anything is better than a Russian jail.

“I Have Faith”

The longer Khodorkovsky stays in prison, the more people seem prepared to listen to his views on how Russia should function. He has published six books and numerous articles while in confinement. The country is desolate: its public space has been systematically destroyed; there are no voices of moral authority able to address more than a few close friends; there is no free politics. Khodorkovsky alone, whether from prison or from a remote penal colony, has managed to fill those gaps. In addition to his formal writings he has corresponded with a number of ordinary people, and some of these exchanges have been published in a Moscow magazine as a regular column. (I was this column’s editor.) Writing in Kommersant, the leading business daily, in the fall of 2011, he provided a detailed argument for taking certain powers away from the Russian president and handing them over to the parliament. “Since 2003, when I wound up behind bars,” he wrote, “presidential power in this country has become increasingly monstrous.”

It is perfectly clear why Khodorkovsky remains in confinement. If released, he may be capable of mobilizing a true mass movement. His family and friends promise to try to talk him into leaving Russia as soon as he is released from prison: they fear for his life. Still, there is little reason to think they will have more success now than they did before he found himself under arrest. At his second trial, Khodorkovsky delivered the summation in his own defense, and his words circulated widely in the Russian-language blogosphere:

It would be no exaggeration to say that millions of pairs of eyes around the country and around the world are watching this trial. They are hoping that Russia will finally become a land of freedom and the law, and the law will be more important than the bureaucrats.

Where support for opposition parties will no longer be cause for persecution. Where the security services will protect the people and the law rather than protect the bureaucrats from the people and the law. Where human rights will no longer be contingent on the whim of the czar, whether he be kind or mean. Where the government will be accountable to the people and the courts will be accountable only to God and the law. Call it having a conscience, if you wish.

I have faith. This is how it shall be. I am not an ideal man, far from it. But I am a man of ideas. Like anyone, I have a hard time living in prison and I do not want to die here. But I will, if I need to, without a second thought. My faith is worthy of my life. I think I have proved it. And what about you, my opponents? What do you believe in? You believe that your boss is always right? That the system is all-powerful? I do not know; it is your decision.

Vladimir Putin, who has been in power in Russia for 12 years, is running for president again, which will probably put him in office for two terms—another 12 years. In other words, he plans to rule Russia indefinitely. With every passing day, Khodorkovsky becomes a bigger thorn in Putin’s side and a bigger challenge to his authority. Which means that, whatever hopeful rumors may be circulating, Mikhail Khodorkovsky will remain imprisoned for a long time to come.